I'm trying to remember - what settings need to be used to ensure the pristine pixels that TT demands?

First off, capture your screens as png files, not jpgs, otherwise you risk getting compression noise in your images. Second, if you need to resize them (typically only if you need to make them larger), then check the resampling settings and choose "nearest neighbor" if possible. Of course, your pixel art will get weird if you scale it up by anything other than an integer multiple, so try out a few sizes and see what works best for your LP.

Right now I'm using PicPick for screen captures, since it lets me take a fixed region of my desktop and I can map it to a button (which is then mapped to my controller via Joy2Key). It gets tripped up if I capture too many shots in quick succession, so maybe Irfanview is a better choice. I already use the latter for batch resizing of my images, so I can definitely vouch for it.

Irfanview gives you the option of just capturing the current active window (with the option of the Windows border or not), which is handier for screenshot LPs.

And yeah, as settings go nearest neighbor or no interpolation/filters for pixel art. The way pixel art is created means that it can be scaled easily with no distortion of the image, eliminating the need for interpolation/filters.

Keep my stuff as abandoned, I deeply apologize. I completely lost my files for my LP's and the workload of college made it impossible for me to follow up and repeat the run. Especially in Dusk that game is a grind and not in the fun way. I probably will come back and LP something in the future as a video LP I now have the tech but it will take a good while.